Telecontact call center workers will be on strike for the whole day on Monday 17 November and from 18 November to 16 December they will abstain from work every day at the end of the shift.
This was announced by the unions in defense of the 1,591 Telecontact workers that «the Tim Group wants to outsource by selling them to DNA, an LLC with a share capital of just 10 thousand euros, a small amount that raises suspicion and worries». A corporate operation that the confederal unions consider “reckless and carried out for the sole purpose of getting rid of 1,591 employees – 80% women – and which they strongly oppose”.
Monday’s strike will be accompanied by demonstrations and initiatives in the cities affected: in Rome, where Telecontact workers number 336, Slc Cgil and Uilcom Uil will hold a demonstration from 9.30am under the Poste Italiane headquarters in viale Europa 190. Workers from Naples (303 employed) and L’Aquila where 30 employees are at risk will also converge here. From 9.30am on Monday, workers from Catanzaro (433 employees at risk, here also a procession), Caltanissetta (336) Ivrea (89) and Aosta (30).
«Poste Italiane (whose majority shareholder is the State through the Ministry of Finance and Cassa Depositi e Prestiti) is the reference shareholder of Tim and the unions ask that it make its intentions more understandable with respect to the prospects of the Tim Group. The institutions strike a blow – they declare – and clarify the plan whose outline began with the transfer of the network and which to date does not yet seem concluded”.
«We want to tell Tim (which declared revenues of 10 billion in the third quarter of this year) that we have well understood the nature of this operation, which has no industrial design and is aimed exclusively at reducing costs. An operation which will have the sole consequence of expelling Telecontact workers from the Tim Group, throwing them into the troubled world of outsourcers which certainly does not need additional manpower but which, on the contrary, is expected to show an opposite trend in the coming years. Instead of continuing with the dismemberment of the Tim Group – states the national secretariat of Slc Cgil – it would be appropriate for the professionalism present in Telecontact to be exploited and the workers, who have consolidated skills and abilities and an average age at least 15 years younger than that of the parent company’s employees, to be valorised and not expelled. After the transfer of the network we would have imagined a reverse path: not a further transfer, rather an internalisation, with a possible professional reconversion to be managed without traumas, given the many activities that Tim manages internally”.
“The confederal union – concludes the note – will counteract this operation with all necessary means to guarantee stability for Telecontact workers – the vast majority part time – for whom Tim is canceling a peaceful working future”